Burner wallet

A burner is simply a fresh address, often in a second account of the same wallet app or in a different browser profile, funded with only what a task needs. Users connect it to a new NFT mint, a freshly launched token, a quest platform or an unaudited dApp. If the site turns out to be malicious or the contract gets exploited, the damage stops at the burner's small balance.

The practice spread with NFT mints and airdrop hunting, where users interact with dozens of new contracts and sign many approvals. It pairs well with a vault wallet, ideally a hardware wallet, that never connects to anything experimental and only receives funds from the burner once assets look safe.

A burner only isolates risk if the separation is real. Importing it into the same seed as the main account is fine, but reusing the main address for convenience defeats the point, and malware on the computer can reach every account. Moving assets from a burner to the main wallet also links them on chain, which matters for privacy and for airdrop teams filtering sybil clusters.